Smoke and Mirrors Take on a Whole New Meaning in California

"Bear Flag State Turns Bearish," Steve Green writes, linking to a column on the formerly golden state at Investor's Business Daily. Of course, for those of who still live here, our first thought is, "Turns?"

his time last year, liberals around the country were trumpeting the big fiscal comeback of the Golden State in the wake of Jerry Brown’s giant tax increase — Proposition 30.

That initiative was passed by voters on Nov. 6, 2012, and it raised the personal income-tax rate on taxpayers making over $250,000 for singles and $500,000 for married couples to as high as 13% — which is the heaviest tax penalty on working and investing in the nation outside of New York City.

What was especially devious is that the tax hit was made retroactive to January 2012. Sacramento was so desperate for money that nobody seemed to mind this after-the fact taxation is really a form of confiscation.

In the short term, it worked and revenues climbed a whopping 21% because California’s top 2% had to pay taxes twice in 2013 — once on their current-year income and a supplemental check to pay for the retroactive tax on income from the year before.

As Steve adds, "So it turns out that 'California Comeback' was based on smoke and mirrors." I wouldn't recommend smoking whatever Jerry Brown's sycophants are puffing (just ask Maureen Dowd) and those mirrors can be be deadly:

Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant's concentrated sun rays -- "streamers," for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair

Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one "streamer" every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator's application to build a still-bigger version.

And thus, the radical environmental left comes full circle:

Liberal acceptance of the mass slaughter of birds since Silent Spring was so gradual some hardly even noticed. http://t.co/F7if8Jw0kZ